I would really like to know what privacy or security problems public libraries have that need to be solved with expensive biometrics equipment and patron ID-ing via fingerprints? Please note that I am not related to Naperville Public Library director Mark West who seems to have a willful misunderstanding of the difference between a fingerpint and a bar code. Please also note that US Biometrics who sold the library the system is headquartered in Naperville Illinois. Here are some more specifics about their arrangement with the library. Note the obligatory library pervert tossed in to the article just to make people think that this level of increased security is necessary for some crime-fighting reason. If you read through to page 2 of the article you’ll notice that only one other library system in the US uses fingerprint IDs on a voluntary basis. The library serves 400,000 people. 1,787 patrons use it. How do you think that works out, in terms of return on investment? [thanks jill]
Month: May 2005
MAO & MPL & FBI & XOX
Don’t take my words for it, you can check out all of the “edgy” ads for the new Minneapolis Public Library on the Friends of the Library site. Apparently at least the Mao image is on hold for now. I was asked by a reporter, completely seriously, if my objecting to these ads was the same as taking a book off the library shelves because I disagreed with what it said. I assured her that it was not.
how people find health information online
Librarians know this, Pew confirms it: people look for health information online in ways that are somewhat irrational [link updated]. Special bonus for those that read to the end of this report: Medical Library Association: A User’s Guide to Finding and Evaluating Health Information on the Web. Note the difference, as highlighted on Crooked Timber of information seeking behavior between people who have broadband and people who have dial-up.
Experts say that Internet users should check a health site’s sponsor, check the date of the information, set aside ample time for a health search, and visit four to six sites. In reality, most health seekers go online without a definite research plan. The typical health seeker starts at a search site, not a medical site, and visits two to five sites during an average visit. She spends at least thirty minutes on a search. She feels reassured by advice that matches what she already knew about a condition and by statements that are repeated at more than one site.
Libraries under USAPA, a cautionary tale
“On June 8, 2004, an FBI agent stopped at the Deming branch of the Whatcom County Library System in northwest Washington and requested a list of the people who had borrowed a biography of Osama bin Laden. We said no.” A USA Today editorial, by a librarian. [lj]
Ontology is Overrated, or, why DDC is not good for organizing the web
Please go read this very long article about classification: Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags. I know it looks like it’s about computers, but it is also about libraries and tags, and sense-making and why you can’t gracefully take library classification schemes and slap them on to web pages. Go. Go now and read and learn.
It’s tempting to think that the classification schemes that libraries have optimized for in the past can be extended in an uncomplicated way into the digital world. This badly underestimates, in my view, the degree to which what libraries have historically been managing an entirely different problem.
It comes down ultimately to a question of philosophy. Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world? If you believe the world makes sense, then anyone who tries to make sense of the world differently than you is presenting you with a situation that needs to be reconciled formally, because if you get it wrong, you’re getting it wrong about the real world…. If, on the other hand, you believe that we make sense of the world, if we are, from a bunch of different points of view, applying some kind of sense to the world, then you don’t privilege one top level of sense-making over the other.
[thanks adam]